18 May
2016
18 May
'16
8:51 a.m.
On Wed, 18 May 2016, John Willis wrote:
Pascal was probably the predominant applications development language on
Mac OS through the mid 1990s or so, no? Certainly all the Toolbox bindings
were originally written with the idea that people would be developing in
Pascal.
Best,
Sean
The problem is that type #2 here covers most people, and sadly, the
ivory towers of the industry & academia do not accept that certain
languages or language features are actually widely-liked or attractive
to people because they do not fit with the prevailing wisdom. So,
although, for instance, TP & later Delphi demonstrated that the Pascal
family can be appealing, practical, and a desirable choice; and the
Oberon OS proves that the Pascal family can be used to build an
entire, practical, useful and widely-used (in its niche) OS from the
metal up.
Let's not forget that the bulk of the Apple Lisa operating system and
at least large parts of the original Macintosh system software were also
implemented in Pascal (though IIRC hand-translated into 68k assembly
language), which was a pretty big mainstream success for proving
Pascal as suitable for developing systems software.